Being Braver Than We Want To Be

Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to Václav Havel’s dissident essays to learn how people can find a collective way back from the democratic ruin now facing her country

In 1969, when I was five years old, I travelled with my parents to Czechoslovakia.

It was the year they became proud US citizens, having been born in German communities in what was then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

It was the same year that humans landed on the moon.

I recall making party favours for their citizenship celebration, using tie-dye bouncing balls that I painted to look like the moon, attaching little astronaut figures holding little American flags. There was a noticeable difference between the land in which my father was born and the land that welcomed him as a new citizen.